WARFARE OR PIRACY?

DESCRIBING AND DEFINING NAVAL COMBAT IN THE

LATE BRONZE-EARLY IRON AEGEAN AND EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN
Jeffrey P. Emanuel, Harvard University
Paper presented at the international conference ‘The Aegean and the Levant at the
Turn of the Bronze and Iron Ages,’ University of Warsaw, Sept. 27-28, 2016

Greetings, and thank you. Today I’d like to pick up a thread that, I think, has been in
need of some theoretical attention for some time: namely, the difference between warfare
and piracy when it comes to naval conflict in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age
transition. Of course, Aren Maeir and Louise Hitchcock in particular have contributed a
great deal to the discussion of the Sea Peoples and pirate groups of late,1 and I’ve done
some recent writing on what we might call (following Michael Wedde) a Galley
Subculture, or a charismatically-led society built around galleys, rowing crews, and their
captains.2

Here, though, I want to focus on theory, which I think is timely, as the acts themselves –
warfare and piracy – are still not clearly delineated. In this talk, I propose to explore to
just what degree that is possible.

As we all know, evidence from the end of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean is
spectacular in its portrayal of a chaotic time of transition, with textual references to
events that modern scholars have vividly interpreted as lightning-fast attacks by enemy
ships that appear from nowhere, pillage and set fire to cities, and quickly disappear,
leaving behind only ruin and, in the cases where survivors remained to feel it, fear. These

1
Hitchcock and Maeir, “Yo-ho, Yo-ho, a Seren’s Life for Me!” World Archaeology 46.4 (2014), 624-640;
“A Pirate’s Life for Me: The Maritime Culture of the Sea Peoples,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly (in
press)
2
Wedde, “The Mycenaean Galley in Context: From Fact to Idée Fixe,” in Laffineur and Greco (eds.),
Emporia: Aegeans in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean (Liège, 2005), 29-38

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texts and inscriptions are complemented by the famous sea battle depiction from Medinet
Habu, whose painted original must have been striking to behold, as well as by fragments
of pictorial pottery from the Greek mainland and western Anatolia showing ships of
warriors facing off in combat on the high seas.

The significance of these individual data points can certainly be overstated, and each has
been imputed with its own share of significance at different times in the past. Further,
while the collapse of the great Late Bronze Age civilizations certainly attests to significant
changes in the delicate balance of the Eastern Mediterranean world at this time, a certain
level of low–intensity conflict seems to have been a constant throughout the Late Bronze
Age.

Rather than amphibious combat being a new phenomenon, the established powers had
experience dealing with these threats. In spite of this, a combination of internal and
external factors in the late 13th and early 12th centuries combined to make seaborne attacks
more effective than they had been in the past, and polities more vulnerable to them.
These included the rapid spread of improvements in maritime technology, with the
development of the oared galley, brailed sailing rig, crow’s nest, and rower’s gallery
covered with partial decking. These also included an increase in the scale of ship–based
hostilities, which was likely part-cause and part-result of the displacement of people in the
years surrounding the Late Bronze Age collapse.

WARFARE OR PIRACY?

But what, of the events we see, should be considered warfare, and what piracy? How do we
define each of these? On the surface, it seems like it should be simple; after all, in war,
armies meet each other in a series of battles for the purpose of serving a larger strategic
goal. This sounds good, but it doesn’t take more than a few moments’ thought to
recognize that this is a simplistic approach. Nonstate actors, irregulars, declared and
undeclared conflicts, and a wide variation in the size and complexity of combatants and
the organizations they represent all serve to compound this issue. Add to this the
geopolitical and military realities of a world before the Westphalian state, before the
Geneva conventions and law of armed conflict, and before the advent of professional
standing armies – all of which, in the grand scheme, are ultra-recent developments – and
we may begin to appreciate the complexity of the question, and the multiplicity of possible
answers, each as potentially correct as the last.

Shifting ever so slightly to differentiation between pirates and soldiers, who, in this period
three millennia prior to our current laws of war, and at a time when texts like the Bible
speak approvingly of treating conquered cities to the ḥērem, can be considered what we
might call a “lawful combatant,” and who a “pirate”?

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This should be a simple question, shouldn’t it? After all, who can’t tell a pirate apart from
a soldier? How hard can this be?

Let’s look again, this time using more chronologically appropriate visuals. Once again
pirate and legitimate soldier.

Easy! Right? In seriousness, these are obviously difficult questions, which have been
debated for centuries and more, and which certainly won’t be definitively or permanently
answered in a single lecture. My hope in the next fifteen to twenty minutes is to begin the
process of teasing out an answer – or, at very least, to leave the discussion a bit less cloudy
than when we began!
BACKGROUND

Let us briefly tour the evidence – most, if not all, of which will be well familiar to this
audience – and then begin the discussion. Evidence from 18th dynasty sources suggest that
both Egypt and Cyprus in particular were regular targets of seaborne raiders, probably by
multiple aggressors.

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Some of these, of course, were identified with the geographic region of Lycia by the king
of Alashiya, whose letter to the Egyptian pharaoh simultaneously declares his own
innocence with regard to the charge of sanctioning raids on Egypt, and denounces the
“men of Lukki” whom, he claims, wage annual campaigns against his own territory (EA
38). The pharaoh’s apparent accusation of Alashiyan complicity or responsibility, on the
other hand, suggests that these raids may have been staged from the Cypriot coast, at least
some of the time.

Meanwhile, an Egyptian inscription commissioned by Amenhotep son of Hapu, dating to

the reign of Amenhotep III, refers to establishing defenses “at the heads of the river–
mouths,” which seems likely to have been a measure against maritime raiders. This may be
echoed, on a grander scale, in the coastal fortresses of Ramesses II.3

Ramesses, of course, laid claim in his second year to having “‘destroyed’ or ‘captured’ the
warriors of the Great Green (Sea),” so that Lower Egypt can “spend the night sleeping
peacefully.”4 In a separate inscription, on the Tanis II rhetorical stele, Ramesses mentions
the defeat and conscription of seaborne Sherden warriors “whom none could ever fight
against, those whom none could withstand, who came bold-[hearted], in warships from
the midst of the Sea.”5

It’s been assumed, of course, that this was the same battle as that referenced in the Aswan
stele, but there is no clear evidence that this is the case. The aggressor isn’t named in the
Aswan inscription, and the frequency with which the coasts of Egypt seem to have been
raided during this period certainly supports the possibility – or, I would argue, the
likelihood – that this text refers to a different adversary. Likewise, the “mixed multitude”
nature of these raiders suggests that even references to the same “groups” might not refer
to the people from the same point of origin, nor to people with a single cohesive identity.

Based on its absence from extant written accounts, the defeat of this “bold–hearted”
enemy seems to have coincided with a temporary dissipation of the maritime threat to
Egypt, which seems to have lasted for the remainder of Ramesses II’s reign. The defeat
and capture of the Sherden and the raiders mentioned in the Aswan stele may have
contributed to this, as may the series of forts Ramesses II established, beginning in the
Delta and concluding 300 kilometers west on the North African coast.

While these fortresses likely served multiple purposes, one seems likely to have been
defense of the desert coast and the fertile Nile Delta from sea raiders, from restless
eastward–looking Libyans, or from a combination of both. This seems particularly true for

3
Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt 2 (Chicago, 1906–7), §916
4
Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions Translated and Annotated: Translations II (Cambridge, 1996), 182
5
ibid, 120

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Zawiyet Umm el–Rakham, an “isolated military outpost reared against a backdrop of near
total emptiness” located at the western edge of the Egyptian frontier. This fortress sat a
scant 20 km west of Marsa Matruh, the small, lagooned site that may have served as a
revictualing station for mariners, and may have been the southwesternmost known point
on the Late Bronze Age maritime trading circuit, or perhaps even have been a base for
pirates, much as the coastal waters of Crete, Cilicia, Cyprus, and elsewhere were at times.6

Effective as they may have been for the duration of his lengthy reign, Ramesses II’s line of
fortresses does not appear to have survived beyond his death in 1213 BCE. As these
defenses went out of use, as if on cue, sea raiders, and those we associate with them, arose
once again in Pharaonic records, this time in the accounts of Merneptah and, ultimately,
those of Ramesses III.

Now, we go outside Egypt. Frequently–cited texts from Hatti and Ugarit of likely 13th and
early 12th century date may provide further evidence for continuous conflict between
maritime raiders and coastal polities, as well as larger powers who owned an interest in
them.

Two texts from Ugarit are both particularly relevant and often treated as companion
letters. In the first, RSL 1, the sender – likely either the king of Alashiya or the king of
Karkemish – admonishes King ‘Ammurapi of Ugarit to prepare the city against a rapidly–
approaching seaborne enemy: “If indeed they have spotted [enemy] ships,” he writes,
“make yourself as strong as possible. [...] Surround your towns with walls; bring troops and
chariotry inside. [Then] wait at full strength for the enemy.”7

The second text, RS 20.238, a letter from ‘Ammurapi to the king of Alašiya, has
traditionally been seen as a response to RSL 1, although this is obviously not the case if
the latter was sent from Karkemish. ‘Ammurapi writes that “the ships of the enemy have
been coming. They have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land.
Doesn’t my father know that all of my infantry and [chariotry] are stationed in Hatti, and
that all of my ships are stationed in the land of Lukka?” He concludes with a report and a
plea: “Now the seven ships of the enemy which have been coming have done harm to us.
Now if other ships of the enemy turn up, send me a report...so that I will know.”8

Also relevant is a report sent from the prefect of Alašiya to ‘Ammurapi, which states that
“(the) twenty enemy ships – even before they would reach the mountain (shore) – have not
stayed around but have quickly moved on, and where they have pitched camp we do not

6
Bietak, “War Bates Island bei Marsa Matruth ein Piratennest? Ein Beitrag zur frühen Geschichte der
Seevölker,” In Nawracala and Nawracala (eds.), ΠΟΛΥΜΑΘΕΙΑ (Maastricht, 2015), 29-42
7
Hoftijzer and Van Soldt, “Texts from Ugarit Pertaining to Seafaring,” in Wachsmann, Seagoing Ships
and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant (College Station, 1998), 343–4
8
ibid, 343

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know.”9 These numbers presented no small threat: depending on their size, the seven
ships listen in RS 20.238 may have contained up to 350 rowers (and, therefore, potential
warriors), while the twenty ships mentioned in RS 20.18 may have collectively contained as
many as one thousand if each was a fifty–oared pentekontor.

Traditional assumptions aside, the relationship between these texts is difficult to discern,
as is their meaning. They clearly speak of a threat, particularly from the sea, and of
circumstances which seem to have prevented Ugarit from mounting a proper defense of
its borders, but they also raise several questions. Were these individual piratical attacks,
or were they part of a coordinated and systematic campaign against the coasts of Syria and
Cyprus? And, relatedly, why were Ammurapi’s ships “stationed in the land of Lukka”
instead of defending their home port at this time of need?

Whatever the reason for Ugarit’s dire defensive situation, seven ships seems to have been
sufficient to cause significant damage to the lands under Ammurapi’s control. We cannot
be certain where these texts fit in Ugarit’s late history, nor if they are representative of
anything other than the standard threats a wealthy coastal polity had to endure from the
sea simply as what we might call “the price of doing business.” However, as noted above,
the destruction and permanent abandonment of the site attests to the fact that something
did eventually change in the early 12th century, and that Ugarit finally met an aggressor
whose attacks it could neither fend off nor recover from.

WARFARE AND PIRACY

So what in this documentary evidence should be seen as piracy, and what as warfare? The
issue is one of theory and terminology – the Scylla and Charybdis, if you will, of any clear
argument and historiographical reconstruction.

The term “piracy” has consistently been used to describe sea attacks of almost any kind,
from state-sponsored to private, while it has been prominently argued that, in the Bronze
Age, there was no distinction to be made between this and warfare. In the chapter of his
Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant that focuses on war and piracy at sea,
Shelley Wachsmann seems to regard the difference as hinging on the involvement or
absence of a state (in the form of troops or vessels), even if that involvement is one-
sided.10

For example, he classifies the aforementioned Egyptian defeat of Sherden “in the midst of
the sea” that is recounted in Tanis II, and the three sea battles against the “enemies of

9
ibid
10
Wachsmann, Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant (College Station, 1998), 317–21

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Alashiya” mentioned in the Hittite text KBo XII 38, as warfare. Raids, on the other hand
– perhaps conducted by these same enemies – are classified as piracy.

While acts of war and of piracy can be placed into these categories, the distinction
between them can be difficult to negotiate. If, for example, a fleet of nonstate actors – for
example a half-dozen ships of Lukka, or Sherden, or Odysseus’ fictional Aegean raiders –
were to conduct a successful raid on the Egyptian coast, striking quickly, gathering
plunder, and escaping to open water, then that would, under this system, be classified as
piracy (and, in my view, rightly so). However, if something went awry on that raid, and the
aggressors were unfortunate enough to come into contact with Egyptian troops, either
while ashore (as described in Odyssey xiv), while afloat but still in sight of land (as in the
Medinet Habu relief), or even in the open water (as Tanis II seems to suggest), this would
transform from piracy to war.

In other words, under this paradigm, it is not the involvement of the nonstate actor that
dictates the terminology employed to describe this type of action or conflict, but that of
the state actor, even if their involvement is one-sided.

Philip de Souza, with whose work on piracy in the Greco-Roman world anybody studying
this area must contend, has declined to split hairs on the issue. Instead, he argues that
piracy simply was not practiced in the Bronze Age. “It cannot be said that there is
evidence of piracy in the historical records,” he writes, “without some distinctive
terminology. People using ships to plunder coastal settlements are not called pirates, so
they cannot really be said to be practicing piracy.” Citing the lack of terminological
differentiation in ancient records, he continues in this vein, saying “It seems to me that
there is no other possible label for this activity than warfare.”11

However, this sets up a situation we may call “de Souza versus de Souza,” as he has written
elsewhere that, “If piracy is defined in general terms as any form of armed robbery
involving the use of ships, then it seems to have been commonplace in the ancient
Mediterranean world by the Late Bronze Age,” noting some of the texts we have already
mentioned here as evidence.12

I would agree with this latter statement, and go a step further by suggesting that we can
begin to draw a distinction between warfare and piracy, at least for our own purposes,
based on the evidence at hand.

11
de Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge, 1999), 16–17
12
de Souza, “Piracy,” in Gagarin and Fantham (eds.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome 5.
(Oxford, 2010), 290-91

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STATE VS. NONSTATE

It is certainly true that piracy typically involves nonstate actors. As Augustine wrote, in a
retelling of a Ciceronian anecdote, “It was an elegant and true reply that was made to
Alexander the Great by a certain pirate whom he had captured. When the king asked him
what he was thinking of, that he should molest the sea, he said with defiant independence:
‘The same as you when you molest the world! Since I do this with a little ship I am called a
pirate. You do it with a great fleet and are called an emperor.’”13

This point of view rings true across the millennia. In his Treatise on International Law, 19th
century attorney William Edward Hall noted that, “Piracy includes acts differing much
from each other in kind and in moral value; but one thing they all have in common; they
are done under conditions which render it impossible or unfair to hold any state
responsible for their commission.”14 An important corollary to this is that, if the
perpetrators do belong to a state or organized community, their actions are a violation
against their own state as well as that of their victims, and their own community can be
responsible for disciplining the offenders.

A glimpse of this can be seen in el Amarna 38, with the king of Alashiya saying, “My
brother, you say to me, ‘Men from your country were with them.’ ...If men from my
country were (with them), send (them back) and I will act as I see fit.”

Hall continued his excursus on piracy by defining the term as “violence done upon the
ocean or unappropriated lands, or within the territory of a state through descent from the
sea, by a body of men acting independently of any politically organized society.” Daniel
Heller-Roazen, in his book The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, notes that
pirates have traditionally been “defined as stateless persons for whose acts on the high
seas no state would be held accountable.”15

WAR AND WARFARE

Conversely, for violence – even organized violence – to be classified as war or warfare, is

participation by multiple states or statelike actors required? Contra Rousseau, this seems
overly restrictive; after all, a state could well regard ongoing, low-intensity combat against
even a loosely organized nonstate threat as warfare.

In the recently-published and highly publicized U.S. Army field manual on

Counterinsurgency, for example, now-retired generals David Petraeus and James Amos

13
Aug. de Civ. Dei IV.4.25, via de Souza, “Greek Piracy,” in Powell (ed.), The Greek World (London,
2002), 185
14
Hall, Treatise on International Law (New York, 1890), 253
15
Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (New York, 2009), 144

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defined warfare as “a violent clash of interests between organized groups characterized by
the use of force” and noted that the means these “organized groups” utilize “to achieve
[their] goals are not limited to conventional forces employed by nation-states.”16

In the mid-1970s, Webster’s dictionary defined war as “a state of open and declared
hostile conflict between political units,” while historian of warfare Keith Otterbein
defined the term as “armed combat between political communities.”17 The flexibility on
state status that terns like “political units,” “political communities,” and “organized groups”
provide rightly “extend[s] the phenomenon of warfare to a large range of societies.”18

However, we should not be too broad in our definition. Anthropologists Allen Johnson
and Timothy Earle, for example, considered all “organized aggression” to be warfare, while
noting that “warfare is on one phenomenon of the varying expression of aggression in
varying institutional settings.”19 Historian Helen Nicholson, writing on the medieval
period, offered a similarly broad definition by suggesting that it be defined as “any form of
ongoing armed violence between bands of men.”20 I would argue that these last definitions
are far too broad, as the only clear factor that it serves to differentiate warfare from any
other form of armed violence is its “ongoing” nature. Clearly, as anthropologist Stephen
Reyna has noted, “while most would agree with a proposition that all war is organized
violence, few would agree with its converse that all organized violence is war.”21

The level of organization, both of the conflict and of its participants, is important, as is
size – not necessarily of those involved in the conflict, but of the organization they
represent, as well as the nature and scope of that conflict. After all, as military historian
David Buffaloe has correctly noted, “By its very nature, warfare is a struggle at the
strategic level. Battles are fought at the tactical level and campaigns at the operational
level, but warfare is waged at the strategic level.”22 Thus, a battle is not itself a war, but is
one part of an ongoing strategic struggle that we may call warfare.

If the correct reading of Ramesses III’s records at Medinet Habu and in the Great Harris
Papyrus is one of systematic, coordinated land and sea campaigns by a confederation of
tribes, for the purpose of a strategic objective, then this can very well be defined as

16
United States Army, Counterinsurgency (Washington, DC, 2006), 1–1
17
Aug. de Civ. Dei IV.4.25, via de Souza, “Greek Piracy,” in Powell (ed.), The Greek World (London,
2002), 185
18
Otterbein, The Evolution of War: A Cross-Cultural Study, 3rd ed. (New Haven, 1985), 3
19
Johnson and Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State (Stanford,
2000), 33
20
Nicholson, Medieval Warfare: Theory and Practice of War in Europe, 300-1500 (New York, 2003), 1
21
Reyna, “A Mode of Domination Approach to Organized Violence,” in: Reyna and Downs (eds.),
Studying War: Anthropological Perspectives (Langhorne, 2000), 30
22
Buffaloe, Defining Asymmetric Warfare (Arlington, 2006), 2

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warfare. This might also be seen in the Ugaritic texts of seaborne assault that we discussed
earlier, particularly if they are correctly combined – as Itamar Singer suggested23 – with
Ras Shamra texts 16.402 and 34.143, which address the Hittite viceroy at Karkemish’s
struggle with an enemy that had established a “bridgehead” in in Mukish. Should the
enemy movement in Mukish be connected to the aforementioned accounts of seaborne
attack, and seen as a land component of a combined land and sea assault? If we accept
these interpretations, then they seem to suggest that the tactic of parallel land and sea
assaults was the modus operandi of at least some groups at this time. Perhaps this includes
those we associate with the ‘Sea Peoples.’

On the other hand, while the situation described by Šuppiluliuma II in KBo XII 38, who
claimed that he fought “ships of Alashiya” three times at sea, and then met this enemy
once again on land, could be read similarly, it could just as easily be read less as warfare
than as a tenacious a counter-piracy operation against an equally tenacious enemy.

PIRACY AND PRIVATEERING

On the other hand, while acts of a piratical nature can be perpetrated by one state or
political unit against another, piracy itself is not carried out between states. This position
was perhaps most explicitly defended by William Hall, who unequivocally declared that
“acts which are allowed in war, when authorized by a politically organized society, are not
[themselves] piratical.”24 This is in keeping with the aforementioned definition of “piracy”
that includes the requirement that no state be able to be held liable for its perpetrators.
At its most extreme, then, acts between states that are piratical in nature would be
classified as privateering, which, while considered “but one remove from pira[cy],” is itself,
to quote Fernand Braudel, “legitimate war,”25 which, as historian David Starkey has
explained, “might serve public as well as private interests; at once a business opportunity, a
tool of war and a factor in the diplomacy between nations.” Starkey further notes the fact
“that privateering was, and still is, confused with piracy is hardly surprising given the
similarities in the aims and methods of the two activities. Both privateersman and pirate
were intent on enriching themselves at the expense of other maritime travelers, an end
which was often achieved by violent means, the forced appropriation of ships and
merchandise. However, there had always been a theoretical distinction between the two
forms of predation.”26

23
Singer, “A Political History of Ugarit,” in Singer, The Calm Before the Storm (Atlanta, 2011), 119–21
24
Hall 1890, 256
25
Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York, 1972), 866
26
Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the 18th Century (Exeter, 1990), 13, 19

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As we see from historian Janice Thomson’s helpful matrix, adapted and reproduced above,
the difference between a Privateer and a Pirate is no more and no less than the state’s
investment in each.27 It is unlikely, of course, that freebooting sailors in at the end of the
Late Bronze Age were carrying physical letters of marque while plundering foreign ships;
such documentation, at least in the form we think of it, is an invention of the early second
millennium CE. However, state sanction of piratical acts (either de facto or de jure)
obviously predates the conflicts of late medieval and early modern history, and we should
thus recognize that non-state actors committing piratical acts on behalf of a supportive
state are very much the ancient equivalent of the privateer, both from the medieval period
and late medieval and modern. The use of privateers, both in war proper and to harass
adversaries, is well documented in Greek history in particular, from the Classical to the
Hellenistic periods. The lack of what we may now think of as formal privateer status does
not mean that this function did not exist at the end of the Bronze Age.

At this point, we seem to be closing in on the heart of the mater: namely, if war and
warfare require the involvement (and assent) of the state or similar organized political
unit, then privateers can be said to have been participants in war, while pirates likely
cannot.

This is not to say that states involved in a conflict with each other cannot (or do not)
consider their adversary to be engaging in piracy through certain seaborne acts of violence.
In a 4th century BCE example, both Demosthenes of Athens and Philip II of Macedon
accused each other of engaging in (and enabling) piracy, for the purpose both of politically
undermining and of physically and economically harming the other.28

On the other hand, an Athenian treaty from the 5th century BCE clearly differentiates
between enemies of the state and pirates, declaring that their partners in the agreement
are “not to admit pirates, nor to practice piracy, nor are they to join in a campaign with
the enemy against the Athenians,” although the demarcation between campaigning, or

27
Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern
Europe (Princeton, 1996), 8, table 1.1
28
de Souza 1999, 36–7

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conventional warfare, and piracy may be as relevant here as that which de Souza
emphasized, which was the difference between pirates and the enemy.29

This fits with what Philip Gosse, writing in the early 20th century, described as a “well-
defined cycle” of piracy. In this cycle, piracy is initially conducted by small groups, which
work independently, using their privately-owned boats to pick off the most vulnerable
prey. Success breeding success, this can lead to collaboration between groups, and greater
danger to merchantmen. While unwieldy size, internal conflict, or a lack of sufficient prey
to support it can lead to the disintegration of the larger group, this confederation can also
grow to the point where it is not just recognized by one or more states, but becomes allied
with them, effectively becoming a mercenary navy, at least for a time. Thus, in Gosse’s
words, “what had been piracy then for a time became war, and in that war the vessels of
both sides were pirates to the other.”30

Left out of this cycle, which we should add, is the liminality between trader or other
maritime actor and pirate, which Michal Artzy so aptly summed by noting that, as
economic conditions became less favorable for “fringe” merchants and mariners, a number
may have “reverted to marauding practices, and the image of ‘Sea Peoples’ familiar to us
from the Egyptian sources emerged.”31 This was a reversible condition, though, and as it
became more favorable to engage in what we might call above-board activities, they could
re-enter what we might call “civilized society” at will.

GUERRILLA AND ASYMMETRIC WARFARE

Piratical operations can also be seen as a form of guerrilla warfare on the sea. Long looked
down upon by states that boasted effective armies, irregular fighters have been described
as “cruel to the weak and cowardly in the face of the brave” – a statement that is likely
only half true, with the latter portion being a response borne of frustration.32 Likewise,
counter-piracy operations could be classified as asymmetric warfare, or “nontraditional
warfare waged between a militarily superior power and one or more inferior powers.”33

Documentary sources suggest that in the Late Bronze Age, civilized people were expected
to communicate both the date and location of a battle, and to wait until their adversary
had arrived and completed preparations before engaging. Only barbarians utilized the
element of surprise, exploiting their opponents’ weaknesses by attacking under cover of
darkness and avoiding pitched battle with regular troops. Quoting Mario Liverani, “This is

29
IG I 75:6-10; de Souza 1999, 32
30
Gosse, The History of Piracy (New York, 1932), 1–2
31
Artzy, “Nomads of the Sea,” in Swiny et al. (eds.), Res Maritimae: Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean
from Prehistory to Late Antiquity (Atlanta, 1997), 12
32
Keegan, A History of Warfare (London, 1993), 9
33
Buffaloe 2006, 17

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not war... it is just guerrilla activity – small-scale warfare, by small people, of small moral
stature.”34 However, for those without a professionally trained and equipped military force
at their disposal, such tactics offered the best chance not only of success, but of survival.
Because of this, for the barbarian – or for any nonstate actor – war as, by its nature, an
irregular, guerrilla affair. Piracy was similarly hit-and-run, at least in part for the same
reason, thus making true warfare and guerrilla activity on land, and piracy at sea,
indistinguishable only for the non-state actor.

In the ancient records, then, rather than being unable to differentiate between warfare
and piracy, we can safely say that we are seeing elements of both. Contra de Souza, hit-and-
run raids conducted from the sea, such as those carried out year after year by the “men of
Lukki,” should in fact be classified as piracy, as are the unnamed threats that armed
escorts, such as those that may have been aboard the Ulu Burun ship, seem to have been
employed to protect against. However, once confederations like those described by
Ramesses III become involved, I believe we may safely say that we have shifted from
banditry on the sea to warfare (even if actions taken by either side can be described as
piratical in their nature).

CONCLUSION

However, lest I conclude this with a false sense of certainty, I should reiterate that the
gray area between warfare and piracy remains large, and the conversation will, like the U.S.
Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling on obscenity, likely always hinge on at least some element of
“you’ll know it when you see it.”

Ultimately, it seems that we must come down to some degree on the side of Obi-Wan
Kenobi: the definitions of warfare and piracy depend, to at least some degree, on your
point of view. However, I hope that it has been made clear over the course of the last
twenty minutes that there are lines between warfare and piracy, and that those can be
drawn back through time to the Late Bronze Age, where we can differentiate – from the
point of view of our various actors – between the two.

With that, I’ll be glad to take your questions and comments. Thank you.

34
Liverani, International Relations in the Ancient Near East, 1600-1100 BC (New York, 2001), 109

© Jeffrey P. Emanuel 2016

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